In place since 2016, the Twitter Trust and Safety Council is disappearing. The new management of the social network is not satisfied with its operation.
If Elon Musk really cares about the policy of moderation on Twitter, he hasn’t frankly issued convincing signals since he was at the head of the social network. The American entrepreneur seems rather in a phase of unraveling the existing. Latest example? The dissolution of the “Confidence and Security Council” in December.
This structure, set up in 2016, aimed to provide advice and observations to help the community site to “ improve the serenity of public conversation “. It was an advisory body, whose remarks did not engage Twitter, but should allow it to properly deal with sensitive and complicated subjects.
Among the issues addressed by this Trust and Security Council were suicide prevention, mental health, dehumanization, human rights, harassment, online safety, child sexual exploitation and digital rights. The council brought together volunteers from all over the world and specialists in these issues.
CNN shared on December 13, 2022 the email sent to members of the Trust and Safety Council. In it, it says that Twitter is looking to ” reevaluate » the integration of external points of view in its moderation policy and its design of the platform. Today, the letter continues, this advice would not be ” not the best structure to do it “.
A council in place for 6 years to help Twitter
It is currently unclear whether Twitter wants to deploy another such advisory body. Still, the company took care to remove the page relating to this advice from its site. She can always be consulted in an archived versionwith in particular the list of all the personalities and external organizations, according to their specialties.
The disappearance of this advice was deemed regrettable by Alex Holmes, the director of the Diana Award initiative, who was part of it. These volunteers volunteered their time when consulted by Twitter staff to offer advice on a wide range of harms and online safety issues “, he wrote.
This structure never imposed its views on Twitter, telling it what to do and how. ” It is therefore disappointing that after many postponements a meeting was canceled and an email was sent to inform the group that the council was disbanded. “, he added. ” The way things happened and the way members were treated is unfortunate and unacceptable. »
” The safety and well-being of Twitter users is down »
anne necklace
A few days earlier, Anne Collier, also a member of this council, had announced her resignation, alongside Eirliani A Rahman and Lesley Podesta, to denounce the trajectory of the social network since its takeover by Elon Musk. ” The safety and well-being of Twitter users is down », they then judgedin a message published on December 9.
The three resigners are not unaware of Twitter’s management desire to now rely heavily on automated moderation. But ” algorithmic systems cannot do everything to protect users from ever-changing abuse and hate speech before detectable patterns develop “, they warned.
Elon Musk says he is very dissatisfied
Anne Collier’s Twitter outing resulted in a sequence in which Elon Musk took the floor to declare that ” it is a crime that they [Twitter, ndlr] refused to take action against child exploitation for years in response to a user who shared a 2021 New York Post article accusing Twitter of inaction on child pornography.
Jake Dorsey, founder and of Twitter, responded to Elon Musk saying to him that this statement is false. However, the American contractor stood by his claims adding that Chief Executive Parag Agrawal and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal failed to take the right steps to improve the safety of children at the site.
” I made it a top priority added the businessman, who on a few occasions has expressed his total determination to be intractable on this subject – whether with Emmanuel Macron, who asked him for his commitmentor in the case of the banishment of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who said nonsense about the Sandy Hook massacre.